Top Ten Mistakes of Shopping Cart Design

Ahhh, shopping. Imagine strolling down the aisle of your local store with your shopping cart. You find an item that you want but before you can put it in your cart you have to give your name and other personal information to a store employee! Then, you want to put an item back on the shelf but every time you try, it appears back in your cart! Then you realize that to really get rid of it you have to state "OK, I want zero of this item!" Chances are if any of these things happened to you in an actual store you would quickly leave your cart behind. However, these are only a few of the things shoppers must face to purchase online. Maybe we shouldn't be surprised that 60 -75% of shopping carts are abandoned in e-commerce sites (Thumlert, 2001; Gordon, 2000). Have web designers forgotten that the purpose of using the terminology 'shopping cart' is so that users assimilate the behavior of a 'real' shopping cart to a 'virtual' one? In our Software Usability Research Lab, we have examined the usability of many shopping web sites and are always surprised by the inconvenience of 'convenient' shopping. Typically when people shop in a store, they are rarely aware of their shopping cart, unless it has a squeaky wheel or is hard to steer. If this happens, at least they can trade it in for one that runs smoothly. Online users, unfortunately, do not have that choice.